Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!bellcore!decvax!decwrl!amdcad!amdimage!prls!philabs!polaris!herbie From: herbie@polaris.UUCP Newsgroups: net.women,net.sci Subject: Re: Re: Re: Why are there so few [female|black] physicists? Message-ID: <678@polaris.UUCP> Date: Thu, 7-Aug-86 18:17:00 EDT Article-I.D.: polaris.678 Posted: Thu Aug 7 18:17:00 1986 Date-Received: Thu, 14-Aug-86 07:00:33 EDT References: <4368@decwrl.DEC.COM> <719@batcomputer.TN.CORNELL.EDU> <670@polaris.UUCP> <771@batcomputer.TN.CORNELL.EDU> Reply-To: herbie@polaris.UUCP (Herb Chong) Organization: IBM TJ Watson RC Lines: 206 Xref: watmath net.women:12016 net.sci:1496 In article <771@batcomputer.TN.CORNELL.EDU> cheryl@batcomputer.UUCP (cheryl) writes: >Yes, as a matter of fact I am. We all got together on it, on an informal >basis of course. Old girls. We didn't make it impossible to even take >the class by asking that men be explicitly denied spots (the way women >couldn't attend Dartmouth in the 60's, the way women, including Marie >Curie were explicitly barred from the French Academy of Sciences....) so instead you turn the tables and give some poor innocent man or two a dose of the medicine women have been receiving all along right? they had it coming to them, didn't they, being male scum? see Cheryl, i can be as ridiculous as you too. >We merely took advantage of their own weaknesses to push things in the >direction which suited us. It's called "POLITICS". When it comes to >men doing this to women, then women finding themselves less qualified >for certain jobs later on in life and therefore being kept out of them, >it's called "ONLY FAIR"! Of course I'm proud to prove how easily peoples' >interests and achievements are influenced by their social environment. wrong. what you did is not politics. it is called sexism: discrimination against a person solely on the basis of sex. you are just as bad as the men you rant and rave about. only one difference, you do it because it makes you feel good. most men do it because they are ignorant. >Are you PROUD to work for a company that invented the female >keypunch operator, not to mention promoting typing as "womens' >work" ? I mean, these are cases where no historical precedent >was set (anyone who even *touched* computers were men, and >secretaries were originally men-in-training for management positions), >and yet, IBM saw the labor pool of women and took advantage of >it in the worst way possible. Just thought I'd point that out. this burns me. instead of somewhat calm discussion of why you aren't as bad as the sexist males you hate so much, you switch to personal attacks and change the subject so no-one will realize that you don't have the foggiest idea what you're talking about. your "facts" are all wrong. you chose the wrong person to spout psuedo-history to. i am a student of computer history and i have a LARGE set of archives of the history of IBM and other computer companies to back me up on this one. the true facts are like this: Herman Hollerith is the inventor of the punched card and card punch machine as we know it today. John Shaw Billings was Director of Vital Statistics for the Census Bureau during the 1870 census and the resources available to tabulate all the data collected was just barely adequate even with a crude mechanical tabulator. Billings saw a crisis approaching for the 1880 census and was looking for ideas to help him get the job done in time. Hollerith was working in the Patent Office at the time and knew Billings as a personal friend. Billings, who knew that Hollerith was an engineer and inventor, asked Hollerith if he knew of a way to solve the problem because analyzing the data for the 1870 census had taken some 5 years to process and the 1880 was estimated to take about 7 years using then current technology. the situation for 1890 looked worse and all indications were that it would take at least 11 years. it was during discussions with Billings that the notion of punched cards came up. Hollerith was familiar with the Jacquard loom which by then had been in use for about 100 years. for the next few years, nothing more came of this conversation. then, in 1882, Hollerith was asked to join the faculty of mechanical engineering at MIT as an instructor. it was there that Hollerith began working on the data collection and processing problem he discussed with Billings. the result of this is that Hollerith invented the punched card as we know it today and the punches to go with it. but still, Hollerith had the only working model in the world. the 1890 census was just around the corner and to become slightly successful, he had to land a contract to be the tabulator for the census to make the machine a reality. the punched card and electric card puncher was patented by Hollerith in 1884 and in 1886, successfully passed a field trial in conducting the census for the city of Baltimore. based on these and other trials, the health departments of New York and New Jersy placed orders for Hollerith tabulators to track mortality statistics. the inquiries were so many, in fact, that Hollerith realized quite quickly that he could not keep up with demand even if he did lose the contract for the 1890 census. in 1889, he was awarded three more patents and acclaim from the scientific business world. in 1890, in competition with the machine from Hunt and Pidgin, Hollerith's machines significantly outperformed his competition's and he won the contract. keyboard keypunch production was subcontracted to Pratt and Whitney while the electrical parts for the tabulators were manufactured by Western Electric. the 1890 census was a huge success, taking about half the time for twice the cost. Robert Porter, Superintendant of the Census noted that although the rental of Hollerith machines cost $750,000, about $5 million in labor costs were saved. machines were quickly bought by Austria, Canada, and Italy. by 1895, card sales for census purposes alone reached the 100 million mark. by 1908, Hollerith was selling about 1 million cards per month to some thirty different industrial concerns while maintaining his government business. despite this, Hollerith's company, Tabulating Machine, was in serious financial trouble. overconfident of himself and having competitors for the 1910 census resulted in loss of the 1910 contract. in 1910, a profitable manufacturer of timing devices, a struggling operation of slicers and scales, and an interesting but aging firm of that made electric tabulators was merged together by one Charles Flint under the name Computing-Tabulating-Recording. Hollerith's company formed the Computing part of the name. in 1913, Thomas J. Watson Sr. joined CTR as general manager. why this history lesson? CTR eventually became IBM and dropped a few things along the way including the clock, scales, and slicer business. the card punch and key punch operator was an established part of the way large industry and government kept track of things for more than 10 years before any entity even slightly recognizable as IBM existed. the legions of keypunch operators worked for the government on the census. the private concerns that used keypunch operators did so for their own internal record keeping. Herman Hollerith, at first, and then James Powers, created a machine that allowed people to do their work faster and with more accuracy. IBM did not. promoting the idea that keypunching was women's work? if you review the history in a little more detail, you will find that Herman Hollerith was so busy during the first few years figuring out how to sort his cards that he barely even had time to show it to anyone else, let alone think of selling them. he was doing a favor for a friend and working on an interesting problem at the same time. getting the census contract was a way of paying for all the time he spent. by the time Hollerith had enough time for a little showmanship, the census bureau had established in their work force thousands of women to mark up and sort the cards in the proper way and file them for the analysts. the women who ran the keypunches were the ones who would have filed the papers and did the card sorting in the previous census. as for the huge labor pool that was tapped for keypunch operators: well for one thing most of the earliest census workers were single women with no skills and no way to earn money to support themselves. have you wondered why families at the turn of the century were so anxious to marry off their daughters? with no employable skills and no suitable place to work other than the various mills, office work was a godsend, even if it meant no difference in pay because it meant that young single women had an acceptable place to work and could contribute some of their income to support the family. more importantly it gave reasonably educated women (for the time) an opportunity to see what they could really accomplish. there became an environment for the organization of women into groups to lobby for womens rights. one of the first tangible results of intelligent young women entering the workforce in droves was the winning of the right for women to vote. it also gave the more conservative men and women of the time concrete proof that the woman's place was not the home and that skilled jobs were within reach. with their newfound financial freedom (as compared to before), women found that they wanted more. this is the other side of the story. it was no coincidence that giving women the vote followed closely the opening of the office to women, even if the tasks were menial. >You just don't like seeing the subtler games men play to keep women down >exposed in such a ruthless fashion. I don't hate men. I'm just able >to see through their games. it's just a mass conspiracy and we men know all these tricks to keep women in their place. devious things like pretending to support women's rights when we're really working to gain the confidence of women so that we can destroy them when they are most vulnerable; things like marrying them, saddling them with kids and then leaving them; things like educating them just enough to understand that they are second class citizens and then kicking them out of schools; things like loving them and leaving them; things like telling them that without a penis, you're a nothing. you're just too clever for us Cheryl. we're going have to eliminate you for this. otherwise, maybe other women will start thinking on their own and get some stupid ideas like equal rights and all that. we can't have that, can we, men? >Did you know that when IBM puts these addresses on business cards, >they're using the ARPA INTERNET (paid for by TAXPAYERS) for their >OWN business purposes? The use of USENET (paid for by the individual >sites) for business purposes is a faux-pas, but the use of ARPANET >like this is ILLEGAL. Just thought I'd point that out. batcomputer.cornell.edu is on ARPA. so is DEC.COM, sun.COM, xerox.COM, att.COM, and a few others. these companies and IBM pay substantial funds to be connected to ARPA; funds which are derived from people paying money for the products manufactured by these companies unlike educational institutions which get money from ARPA and ultimately the taxpayer to pay for their connections. posting from batcomputer is using a DARPA funded network AND computer for personal purposes. i should think that if what i'm doing is illegal, then what you're doing is twice as illegal. no-one is under any obligation to send me mail on my ARPA address and those that chose to will almost invariably be on the ARPA network in the first place. on top of which is the fact that this machine i post from is only connected to USENET via a dialup line which we pay for. subtlety was never your strong point Cheryl, and personal attacks do nothing for your credibility and does not forward the cause of womens rights. all it does is get a lot of people angry with you. (but i forgot, it's all a conspiracy.) since you chose to make unsubstantiated and untrue statements about me and my employer in a public forum, i am bound to defend myself and my employer in public. Herb Chong, IBM Research... I'm still user-friendly -- I don't byte, I nybble.... VNET,BITNET,NETNORTH,EARN: HERBIE AT YKTVMH UUCP: {allegra|cbosgd|cmcl2|decvax|ihnp4|seismo}!philabs!polaris!herbie CSNET: herbie%ibm.com@csnet-relay ARPA: herbie@ibm.com, herbie%yktvmh.bitnet@wiscvm.wisc.edu ======================================================================== DISCLAIMER: what you just read was produced by pouring lukewarm tea for 42 seconds onto 9 people chained to 6 Ouiji boards.